Stock Market Today: Nasdaq Nears Record After Nvidia Earnings

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Stocks took their cues from a sizzling overnight session for the Japanese equities market and a red-hot post-earnings rally for Nvidia (NVDA). Indeed, the main benchmarks soared up the charts Thursday, with two of the three notching new record closes.

There were two main catalysts that sparked today's broad-market rally. One was the overnight move in Japan's stock market, with the Nikkei hitting a fresh record high for the first time since December 1989.

"The Nikkei has been buoyed by another wave of excitement for the prospects for the tech sector," says Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, adding that a weaker yen has helped boost exporters including Toyota, Honda and Sony.

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The index's "performance has also been boosted by corporate governance reforms to make businesses more accountable to shareholders which appear to have enthused investors, including Warren Buffett who has been bullish towards Japanese stocks," Streeter adds.

Nvidia soars on impressive Q4 results

The other main driver of Thursday's price action was Nvidia's blowout earnings report. The chipmaker's results were one of the most highly anticipated of the earnings season given its pole position in the generative AI (artificial intelligence) space, and it did not disappoint.

For its fourth quarter, Nvidia reported earnings of $5.16 per share, up from 88 cents per share in the year-ago period. Revenue jumped to $22.1 billion from last year's $6.1 billion as data center revenue quadrupled.

What's more, the company is calling for first-quarter revenue of $24.0 billion, a remarkable improvement over the $6.5 billion in revenue it reported in the year-ago period.

"This last year, we've seen a generative AI really becoming a whole new application space, a whole new way of doing computing, a whole new industry is being formed and that's driving our growth," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in the company's earnings call.

NVDA stock surged 16.4%, adding $277 billion to its market capitalization – the most ever added by a company in a single session. To put that figure in perspective, it is more than the entire market cap of Dow Jones stock Coca-Cola (KO, -0.2%) or streaming giant Netflix (NFLX, +2.6%).

AMD adds $28 billion in market value after Nvidia earnings

Nvidia's earnings report had a halo effect on other chip stocks. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), for one, jumped 10.7%, gaining $28 billion in market value along the way. Arm Holdings (ARM, +4.2%), Broadcom (AVGO, +6.3%) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM, +3.0%) were also notable gainers.

As for the indexes, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average (+1.2% at 39,069) and the S&P 500 (+2.1% at 5,087) finished at record closes. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 3.0% to 16,041, and is now within striking distance of its closing peak of 16,057.44 set in November 2021.

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With over a decade of experience writing about the stock market, Karee Venema is the senior investing editor at Kiplinger.com. She joined the publication in April 2021 after 10 years of working as an investing writer and columnist at a local investment research firm. In her previous role, Karee focused primarily on options trading, as well as technical, fundamental and sentiment analysis.